


you ruined all your pie crusts

by cartographicalspine



Series: refuge for a flock [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Conversations, Gen, Lothering, Memories, Nostalgia, POV First Person, Past Character Death, The Fade, mothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-19 20:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17008695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographicalspine/pseuds/cartographicalspine
Summary: Hawke and Leandra go back in time to bake some pies.A strange nostalgic conversation between Hawke and Leandra in first person. "You" is directed at Leandra, and it's very confusing and awkward for everyone.





	you ruined all your pie crusts

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how to bake sorry.

A cup measure, then half, finely ground and sifted into the bowl. Two eggs cut with butter and added in, or perhaps rubbed in this time. I don’t remember if there is a difference anymore; it forms fine crumbs all the same beneath my fingertips.  
  
Water next, little by little, a murmuring trickle like the thinnest stream, those minute connections between crevices.  
  
Sudden splashing.  
  
“Too much water,” I sigh, knowing without looking up. “You’ll make it soft and doughy.”  
  
“I didn’t add too mu—”  
  
You hiss dismay. I can already imagine the mess on your hands. Sure enough, when I look over, you sink your hands into the watery little lump in your bowl. You frown and shake your head at me, but I can’t look you straight on. “I was never very good at this.”  
  
“You fed us every day,” I point out lightly, occupied with cleaning the counter. I remember the day old Barlin and Elder Miriam’s husband got their boys to help bring it in. “Three small children and a loving husband. There’s always that.”  
  
“And don’t think I missed a single grumble and gripe from you all. Especially from that loving husband.”  You dig the cloves and yeast out of the cupboard with the creaky hinge and choose rosewater over currant paste, which was Father’s favorite. “What a woman like me thought she was doing out in the middle of Ferelden farmland, I’ll never know.”  
  
I shrug and wipe little crumbs off my hands, watching you coax your ruined pie crust into a base for fine cakes. “Making the best of messes like this, I suppose.”  
  
Your eyes twinkle as you glance at me. You look as you always did and I don’t know why I would expect differently. The sun catches in your chestnut brown hair, only a few shades darker than your skin, but grey had always crouched at the roots of it, ready to harry you for the rest of your life. I know because I find the same colors threaded dark and light in my own brush every morning these days.  
  
“Is that what you call this?” Your hands keep busy, shaping row after row of little flat cakes on the one tray Carver and I hadn’t dented while playing at knights and princesses with Bethany. “I tried to spoil your father with a dessert and instead spoiled his appetite with these. He never could keep his hands off the cooling tray.”  
  
“To be fair, they were fresh and very easy to sneak.”  
  
You scoff impatiently despite your smile, and I wish you wouldn’t. “I know your part in it, too. A full dinner and no one to eat it because my family had already made short work of all those ruined pie crust cakes. I could never decide whether I was fixing the mess or not.”  
  
“You didn’t care about that in the end and you know it.” I turn to the open door to the yard, to where the hens are fussing over new chicks and the old cock scrounges up a fight with whichever Lothering dog has been fool enough to encroach this far into his territory. “You were smitten with us.”

“Even your father,” you chuckle, wiping your hands on the rag I left on the counter.

“Even? _Especially_ him.”

“When did you get so cheeky with me? You sound almost like the twins when you say that.”

“That…” I can’t help but to grin though it’s foolish. I was always an awkward part of the family; this feels sort of like belonging again. “That’s a fine compliment. I don’t think I can remember the last time I was ever anything like—”

I close my mouth and step down. One creaky step groans, then the second, and the ground is warm through my shoes.

You follow me into the back yard, sidestepping downy chicks and round, restless hens until we’re in the garden, all rosemary and thyme. There’s a little patch, though, that blooms nothing but roses. The Blight will sear it all but one stubborn blossom for a boy in a man’s armor to pick for his sweetheart. I’ll miss that shy, grinning trespasser for the Paxton homestead spewing up poison gas from a darkspawn breach. No fiends but a lot of black corruption, one last warning sign before the evacuation as the horde descended upon little Lothering.  
  
Right now, the roses are hale and prickly and the deepest red I’ve ever seen. It’s picturesque and dreamlike. Unreal.  
  
You lean against the faded, peeling fence with a sigh, tucking your grey hair behind your ear. The afternoon sun glints off the ring Father gave you when you both ran. I looked through a dozen women’s severed hands and the blood-soaked pile of their clothes-belongings-bodies for it.

I never did find it.

“There’s a look on your face,” you say, hair caught up helplessly in the breeze so that I can only imagine your expression, “that I don’t remember seeing before. But the last time we spoke, that’s all I could see of you.”

I blink in the stinging light, upwards and unmoored because all the distance and years have suddenly disappeared, and you and I are side by side for the first time again. It’s strange how much more frightening this is than the reality, because you and I aren’t really here, no, but I couldn’t bear the thought of a fantasy where our roles are the reversal of our last conversation, pasted-on smiles and quiet weeping over a broken body. As much as it hurts to be alone, I would rather imagine us like this until it’s over and what’s left of me stops fueling the dream.

I couldn’t imagine saying any of this in person, not when you asked me the question back in the Amell estate, sometime before the white lilies appeared on the correspondence table, _are you happy?_  I choked and spilled half the ink over my desk, the other half in my lap. You were disappointed over the terrible green tunic I ruined, and everyone else was disappointed over my lack of a proper reply to all those letters for a month.

This time, though, I have an answer for that; it comes smooth and sweet like the rosewater you wove into the cakes you made just for me, strong and bright like the secret dash of saffron to that poor pie crust on the counter. “I was happy in Kirkwall, too.”

There’s no lie and if you were real, you would see it well. How could I say differently when I remember Fenris’ voice, warm with alcohol and affection, as we sat in the deep, amber glow of his fireplace? When I think of Isabela with the light of the sun coming off her, golden and dark and flying on the ropes of her ship over the water? When I see Sebastian over my shoulder, laughing and electric, another arrow notched with all the certainty he didn’t know he had?  When the feeling of Merrill’s fingers (intertwined with magic and my own as flowers grew in dry Alienage soil) still comes to mind? When I think of every time Anders—worn and hungry and down to embers—smiled at the feeling of one more patient pulling through? Aveline and Varric too, for all the grief I gave them, were like the familiarity and comfort I associated with Lothering. Kirkwall had also been home.

I can’t say any of that. You reach out, a whole, healthy hand with calluses and scars but no ghastly, stitch-like patchwork, and it feels like nothing because you’re not there.

“Tell me what happened, my primrose,” you say, and I smile and we talk about Kirkwall until it goes dark enough that you and I disappear with the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah Hawke is dying in the Fade don't @ them.


End file.
